For most scientists having a venture capitalist or a representative from a big company on the phone, calling to discuss investments in your baby-project, is a dream that rarely comes true. For Gunilla Jacobson, researcher in the Department of Chemistry at Stanford Univesity, investors are beating a path to her door.
Investor interest in her is so great that she tries to avoid them.
“I want to get more results before deciding how to commercialize this,” she says.
Dr. Jacobson works in the hot field of nanomedicine. She is one of many scientists exploring how minute nanoparticles could be used to deliver a drug to certain locations in the body. If successful, this technology could revolutionize, for example, cancer treatment.
Today’s chemotherapy treatments are limited by serious side-effects of toxic drugs that hit the wrong target and wipe out healthy cells.
“What you really want is a target-specific delivery where the drug only reaches the cancer cells, “ says Dr. Jacobson.
To achieve this, Dr. Jacobson is developing a nano-sized Trojan horse, which won’t attack until it’s inside the tumor. She encapsulates the chemotherapy agent into a biodegradable nanoparticle, which she subsequently covers with molecules designed to stick to cancer cells. When injected into the bloodstream, the particle will travel freely until it hits a tumor and sticks.
Eventually the cover of the particle will degrade and its toxic load will leak out within the tumor area.
There are many competing versions of this approach developed by scientists at labs around the US. They may use different covering materials and different production methods. The advantage of Dr. Jacobson’s system, she says, is that she only uses FDA approved substances, which increases the chance of getting the drug approved. Furthermore, the manufacturing method is scalable and does not involve any expensive or unhealthy organic solvents. “At the lab we are making milograms nanoparticles, but if needed we could easily start to make kilograms,” says Dr. Jacobson.
Not all scientists think of commercialization while designing new drugs. But Dr. Jacobson, 38 years-old, knows the harsh economic demands imposed by an industrial process. She also has experience working in the industry as well as at four different universities.
She started her carrier as a Ph. D. student at Uppsala University in Sweden. This was followed by post-doc studies at University of Texas in Austin. Then she moved to the famous Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. After four years at universities, she felt she was ready for industry. She moved to Phoenix and joined a start-up company, Supercritical Systems, Inc. (SSI), which makes equipment for the semiconductor industry.
“It was a big shock for me, but also a very valuable experience," she says. "There was a lot more pressure to deliver results, both financially and from customers."
But she loved business. “In small start-ups, it is a win or lose situation," she says. "It matters more what I do."
Her situation changed when SSI was bought by Tokyo Electron Ltd, a large Japanese company.
“Suddenly people said things like 'we have already tried this,' and it became very static,“ says Dr. Jacobson.
She moved to Stanford, where her mother -- a material scientist -- once worked. “It feels as if I have come home at last," she says.
Monday, March 17, 2008
Nano can Revolutionize Cancer Therapy
Paul Romer On Influence of Institutions and their Future Challenges
Paul Romer, one of the leading economists of United States, was the primary developer of New Growth Theory, providing new basis for business and government thinking about wealth creation and profits. Now he is on to new theory of a Non rival goods. Here is what he thinks about the role of institutions in accordance with non-rival goods and their technological and political challenges...
Friday, March 14, 2008
It's not about the science, stupid
Innovation, anyone? R&D? University funding?
As sure as the presidential election won't be about foxhunting, it won't be about science and technology.
"We've sort of resigned to the fact that America is a funny country," says Woody Powell, professor at Stanford University and editor of the journal "Research Policy."
It sure is funny - or at least weird - that an industry spending way over $300 billion a year gets less attention than if a superdelegate decides to use the bathroom in the Clinton mansion.
But contrary to popular belief, it's not all the media's fault.
"The scientific community has very few spokespersons on the national level," Powell goes on. "Perhaps it's because we're reluctant to talk out loud about how dependent we are on foreigners at the moment. A lot of people wouldn't like that."
Another reason is that most universities hesitate when it comes to openly embracing the gritty rules of politics.
"We are supposed to be Eiffel towers," Powell says. "Eiffel towers don't get down in the mud."
So what about the candidates? Don't they have any interest in raising the issue?
"The candidates can't start talking about things where there is basically no difference between themselves and their opponent," says Kei Koizumi, director of the R&D Budget and Policy Program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
So is there any difference in the three candidates over science and technology policies? Well, at least none that are remotely big enough to compete with more pressing issues.
"Most voters are understandably focused on the economy, healthcare, and Iraq," says Tom Kalil, who is an adviser to Hillary Clinton on innovation policy.
The candidates do have some differences on science and technogy policy.
"There is a foundation that is common," Mr. Koizumi says. "What unites them is first and foremost the strong support for federal funding and embryonic research."
Things that separate them are obviously harder to find. McCain really likes tax breaks and thinks they are also a mean to foster innovation.
More important, though, he supports expansion of the H1-B visas - in opposition to some of his party colleagues
"But mere expansion is not enough. Reforms should eliminate the artificial limits and allow the Department of Labor to set a level of visas appropriate for market conditions," Senator McCain said earlier this year.
Barack Obama also shows strong support for H1-B visas. He supports "net neutrality" and wants to establish a national Renewable Energy Portfolio Standard that in 2025 would require renewable energy sources to represent 25 percent of the US electricity consumption.
"Clinton has the most elaborate plan of the candidates," says Patrick Windham, a lecturer at Stanford University and a former adviser to Al Gore.
She wants to establish a $50 billion Strategic Energy Fund to promote renewables. More significantly, she wants to increase the NIH budget by 50 percent over 5 years and double it over 10 years.
"That would have a lot of impact," says Mr Koizumi. "But I have no idea where she will find the money."
AAAS compares the candidates
TechChrunch endorses McCain and Obama
HP opens up the Lab doors
With it’s new Idea Lab, Hewlett-Packard gives outsiders a peek into their corporate research. The aim is to attract input from users, in the hope that it will speed up the companys’s innovation process.
Imagine opening your closet and immediately finding yourself face-to-face with a fire-breathing dragon, fresh from the gates of Hell. Or that you can look right through the wall of a building and see exactly where the electrical wires and water-pipe goes.
It might all be possible, using new a technology developed at HP Labs, Hewlett-Packard's corporate research organization. Called Mscapes, it imposes a virtual environment upon the real, physical one, and uses GPS-based navigation to pinpoint exactly where you are.
Mscapes is one of a number of projects that HP Labs is exhibiting in its new web site for Idea Lab, which gives visitors a hint of what the corporation’s researchers are up to. Here, you can download examples of new software, look at demos and write your comments and submit examples of your own on the site’s forums.
The Idea Lab is part of HP’s new “Open Innovation” strategy, a major component in the radical reorganization of the labs that Hewlett Packard announced last week. “We recognize that not all smart people in the world work at HP Labs,” said Prith Banerjee, head of HP Labs, during a presentation last week.
By encouraging feedback, the HP´s management hopes to encourage users and outside developers to help the company bring new innovations to market faster.
Some examples on display at the Idea Lab include new photoediting tools, mobile printing from cellphones and a service for republishing of old books on demand. The site also shows a new way of capturing and viewing small, almost undetectable details on objects.
The Idea Lab can be seen as an attempt to emulate the success of user-driven software development and user-generated content -- like Linux, MySQL, Flickr, Picasa and Facebook. If a big corporation like HP really can acheive this remains to be seen. However Mscape is already on its way to building a user community that creates its own content -- be it travels through a mysterious time-hole or a simple game where you stamp out moles (virtual ones that is).
Patrick Windham : Doubts on America's Innovation Strategy
Patrick Windham served as Senior Professional Staff Member for the Subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Space of the U.S. Senate’s Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. Holding an authority on science, and technology policy issues here is what he thinks is lacking in America’s innovation strategy and health care sector in specific...
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Apple Inspires Tesla's All-Electric Sports Car
Hey, you think that two weeks is a long wait for the latest Apple MacBook to get into stores?
Well, that is nothing compared to how long – 18 months – that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, actor George Clooney and Google's Larry Page have waited for the first all-electric sports car ever to be sold in the U.S.
The sleek $100,000 Tesla sports car goes into production on Monday – with actual deliveries starting in a few weeks. The arrival of the car, offered by a closely-watched company in San Carlos, California, will delight the many celebrities who have ordered it. The Tesla Roadster represents a new trend in electric vehicles, the merger of automotive engineering with the ethos and elan of Silicon Valley.
"The company that we strive to emulate is Apple,” says Daryl Siry, Vice President of Sales, Marketing and Service at Tesla Motoros. “We want to be a company that innovates not only on the tech side but also on the design side. It is about developing cars but also about customer experience.”
While Siry's comparison between an all-electric sports car and an Apple's product line might seem like a stretch, Tesla's car is unquestionably a breakthrough, offering the equivalent of 100 miles to the gallon – and a driving range of 220 miles before a re-charge – for roughly the same price of a conventional Porsche 911 sports car.
One morning earlier this week, a silver Tesla is parked by the entrance of the company's headquarters. The car is receiving an electric charge from a thick electric cord plugged into a socket on its left side, where normally gasoline might go.
The car being charged in the morning sun is a prototype Tesla. Not only cars are getting charged this morning, which happens to be the day when one of the company's engineers arrives with plate after plate of freshly baked cookies – hundreds of them in all, more than enough to satisfy the 180 people who work at Tesla's main office.
“Making an all-electric car go fast is the easiest challenge,” says Mr. Siry, Tesla. “Making it go far is the challenge.”
Unlike other electric cars, Tesla's model does not have a traditional lead-acid battery. Instead, it runs on a lithium-ion battery that is lighter and longer-lasting. Nevertheless, the car will need to pause for a refill halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Delays in producing its first car – production was supposed to begin last October but the company fell behind schedule after deciding to use a different transmission – have fanned skepticism about whether Silicon Valley, home to computer and Internet companies, really can nurture a new automobile maker. Tesla wants to prove the doubters wrong.
“Some are very skeptical about people in Silicon Valley producing cars,” Mr. Siry admits. “And sure, building vehicles is something very hard.”
The automobile industry operates under strict government regulation, a stark contrast with the computer and software industries, where new products can be released with serious flaws and then later be fixed with relatively painless "upgrades".
“With things like the iPhone you can just go ahead without checking with anyone,” says Mr. Siry.
Tesla is also breaking the mold by planning to build only small batches of its sport car, treating it like a fine wine rather than a mass-produced laptop computer. The company plans to produce 600 cars this year – all purchased already, Mr. Siry says – and another 1,200 next year.
Small volumes are possible because of Tesla's six-figure price – a price likely to increase over time. As a result, the company can earn money while remaining a speciality producer.
“Break-even is between 1,000 and 2,000 cars a year,” Mr. Siry says, about the sports car. He says the company also plans a 4-door passenger sedan, perhaps as early as 2010. That car, he predicts, will cost between $50,000 and $70,000.
The car's high prices comes partly from its lithium-ion battery. Each one costs about $20,000, or about one-fifth of Tesla's price. Demand for lithium-ion batteries, widely used in computers, currently exceeds supply, which explains the high prices for them. The Tesla Roadster uses more than 6,000 individual lithium battery cells, a staggering number, more than a thousand times the number used in a laptop.
On a recent visit to Tesla, a couple of engineers chat quietly as they charge five prototype vehicles in the company's small assembly area. The sports cars glimmer in colorful shades of red, orange, green and blue. They resemble big Apple iPods, the difference being that these cars are ready to take you on a 125 mph ride down Highway One.
Tesla still faces issues with its new transmission, which runs only in a single gear (most gasoline-powered cars have four or five gears). The single gear permits fast acceleration.
“It is going to take us another three or four months to start production with the new transmission system." Mr. Siry says.
The cars going into production on Monday are built on the old transmission system with two gears. Tesla is going to offer owners of the first few dozen cars the chance to swap out the old transmission and get the new one.
“It is only going to impact 30 or 40 people and we did not want to wait any longer with the launch,” says Mr. Siry. “The decision to start production with an interim transmission was not a response to critics. It was a response to customers who said, ‘give us the damn car.’”
Send Emails from your mobile -- for free!
Mobile phones have plenty of smart functions, most which are unknown or simply irrelevant to the majority of users. The useful applications you really want -- like access to your email, contacts and calendar -- are difficult to set up and costly. So even though almost all mobile phones today could be used for reading email, very few people do that.In short, emailing from a mobile phone in America has so far been limited mainly to expensive smart phones -- until now. Funambol an Italian company based in Milan, intends to offer a new email service in the U.S. that is free and easy to use.
Mobile email for free? Is there a catch?Indeed there is. Funambol, which has an office in Redwood City, California, on the northern edge of Silicon Valley, wants users of its email system to watch small ads when they send and receive. The idea is that ad revenues will cover the service cost.
Funambol already has a customer base of one million people, mostly in Japan. The service is free and Funambol is now in talks with American telecom carriers on how much they will charge for transmitting the data between the company server and the mobile phone. Says Hal Steger, vice president in charge of marketing: “Operators can make the data free, and we hope that this at least will be the case with new operators that have nothing to lose.”
All a user must do is register his or her phone number at an Internet portal, after which a SMS with the configuration code is sent to the mobile phone.
The software is open source, which means it can be downloaded at the company website for further development.
“Forty thousand developers have already downloaded our software," says Mr. Steger, who showed off Funambol's email service at the OSiM conference on "mobile open source" in San Francisco on Wednesday.In an interview, Mr. Steger shows a world map provided by Google Analytics that indicates where downloads have gone -- mostly to India and China. These two countries are likely to generate the largest demand in future for mobile email. India alone has 225 million mobile phones, more than even in the U.S.
Mr. Steger says there have been two million downloads of the program. That suggests that the system is well tested.
Funambol's software works with Mcrosoft's Exchange Server, which is used by many companies for corporate email. In the near future, Mr. Steger says Funambol will also announce important business deals with the mobile phone company Nokia and the content provider AOL:“But it will take a couple of more years before the development really starts going," estimates Mr Steger.
Honeymoon with open software is over, says Nokia
There has been much buzz about open software used for operating systems in mobile phones, and the expected arrival of the Google Android during the second half of this year will add to the excitement.
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Paul Saffo: Robots the Next Big Thing
Paul Saffo, technology forecaster and futurist, predicts Robots to be the next big ‘Wow’ of the 21st century. Here is what he says, talking to the InnovationBeat newsroom.
All-Electric Tesla Roadsters Lined Up in Assembly Plant
Tesla's Vice President Darryl Siry takes us on a tour of the assembly plant in San Carlos, CA.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Virtual reality changing social behaviors
Maybe virtual reality is going to solve one of the greatest health issues facing Americans today - physical inactivity – by influencing their social behaviors through computer simulation.
“We have developed model that allows people to see what they are and how they look like on TV,” says Jeremy Bailenson at the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University.
Jesse Fox, a candidate for Ph.D, who has actually done the studies and developed the model, says, “People who look at themselves running in virtual reality for a period of 24 hours actually exercise more in the real world”.
“This seems to indicate that program will make them do it (exercise) later or change their life pattern”, she says, speaking about a study she made about how people experience virtual reality.
Ms. Fox explains that she has created another program in which a teacher in virtual reality looks at every student at the same time. This makes the teacher appear more life-like. So students pay more attention to the lecture.
“In virtual reality, we can produce unique, new social structures,” Ms. Fox says.
Can lesson from the lab be used in business? Bailenson and Fox say they are not worried about the commercial relevance of their research. “It is not our job to do marketing,” says Ms. Fox. “We have developed a program. It is now up to the people who do business how they transform it in the market place.”
Two new players challenge the navigation market
While stopped in traffic, have you wanted to read the menu at an unfamiliar restaurant? Now you can do that -- and much more -- with new automobile navigation systems from a very young company and a very old one.
Over the next few months, Dash Navigation, of Mountain View, Calif., and the German automobile giant, BMW, plan to launch new navigation systems. Both companies previewed them at a Mobile Monday event hosted by Google at its headquarters this week.
Dash Navigation showed off a new Web 2.0-type "mashup" for cars; a Web-enabled GPS device that combines navigation -- how to get somewhere -- with information about what you can do, spend or buy when you get there. The information also includes customer ratings and low-price options.
Chris Butler of Dash handled the demonstration, deftly producing a favorite sushi restaurant from a general query. Mr. Butler also showed that the system can receive and benefit from information from a driver's personal computer.
Now Dash uses data provided by Yahoo, but "in the future we might use data from Google," Mr. Butler said, making his listeners -- consisting of dozens of journalists, engineers and business people -- chuckle in between eating slices of pizza, bought and paid for by Google.
The Dash system, presented by Mr. Butler, also shows how much traffic there is and suggests the fastest route to a destination. This is done by collecting data from other Dash users and comparing it with historical data collected, said Rob Currie, President and Chief Operating Officer of Dash.
Mr. Currie, who also was at the meeting, admitted that Dash's che challenge at this point is that there are not so many Dash users in order to provide adequate data for a complete picture of traffic flows. The system is designed to work better the more people use it.
The cost of the Dash system came as a surprise to some in the audience. The device, which will go on March 27th, will cost $599.99. In addition, there is a $10 monthly service fee.
"Why would anybody want to pay that much for traffic information system that has far too little data," wondered an engineer in the audience.
Some popular navigation systems can be purchased for under $200.
BMW, meanwhile, described new features to its existing navigation system, "BMW Connected Drive," which is currently sold in Europe. The product will be launched in the US market in April, said Jeff Zabel of BMW.
Mr. Zabel said the BMW system will make use of a Google application that includes current, accurate maps to be sent from a personal computer to the car's computer.
BMW has in the pipeline an application that allows a driver to browse the Web while sitting the behind the wheel -- hopefully stuck in traffic.
Failing broadband policies a threat to innovation
The debate around network neutrality remains a hot topic of discussion among telecom companies and service providers. Vint Cerf, Vice President of Google, regards the lack of regulation a threat to innovation.
When Mr. Cerf and his colleagues at Stanford University built the foundation for today’s Internet back in the 1970s’, they built it as an open environment that would be accessible to anyone. The past 20 years have seen a transformation of the Internet and how people access it, from dial-up telephone modems to different types of broadband connections, either by cable, DSL, satellite or fiber.
“Many broadband suppliers suppress what should be an open media,” says Cerf. “Not only will that suppress open expression, but it will also suppress innovation. If you have to work in arrangement with every Internet service supplier in the world in order to try out your new service, it will essentially suppress the ability to invent and innovate in the Internet.”
A number of companies, including Google, became quite alarmed when the former head of AT&T, Ed Whitaker, said, “companies like Google are getting a free ride and are not paying me for their use of my broadband channels to my customers.”
“Today there is a lack of competition in broadband which makes it possible for the party that controls the physical access to the Internet to favor that company’s applications”, says Cerf.
That’s not the business model Cerf and his colleagues had in mind when they started the net.
“So when Mr. Whitaker made his assertion a number of us begun to see the potential for very biasing decisions on the part of the broadband providers of things that were very antithetical to the interests of the consumers”, says Cerf.
In the last few years emotions have been running high in the American telecom business as Congress debates whether a law should be passed saying you must not discriminate among the application providers. Suppliers of broadband promise they will not favor their own services over others, but treat everyone essentially the same.
“After the telecoms and cable companies asserted in hearing that they would never interfere with someone else’s traffic, it was discovered that Comcast was analyzing the traffic that was flowing on their broadband channels”, says Cerf. “Anyone who was running bit torrent was shut down. I don’t blame them for wanting to control the traffic, but they chose a method to do it that was chilling because it implied that someone who controls the underlying transport could decide what traffic could flow and what traffic could not flow on the basis on what kind of traffic it was.”
Cerf likens broadband access to other critical infrastructure such as roads, electricity, and water:
“In other parts of the world it is recognized that this is basic infrastructure and there may not be a natural ability to put in competitive, alternative physical facilities. In the United States facility-based competition has been the mantra of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for some time now and frankly I don’t believe it works. And in the absence of that we have to create the regulatory framework that says you cannot take advantage of your carriers to interfere with applications.”
Monday, March 10, 2008
Break-through for all-electric sports car
Series production is re-scheduled to commence on March 17. Tesla Motors, a private company funded in part by a founder of Paypal, was
supposed to start production in October of last year, but problems with its car's transmission system delayed release. Laurie Yoler, a board member of Tesla Motors, confirms the introduction schedule in an interview with InnovationBeat.
The Tesla Roadster is a unique experiment, combining the style of a top-line 2-seat convertible sports car with the environmental profile of a sensible hybrid. The company wants to lead the changeover to electric cars without compromising on elegance.
Tesla plans to build only 600 cars this year. Every car is delicately put together with inputs from suppliers and partners scattered around the globe. Design and most of the assembly is made by Lotus Cars in England, motor production takes place in Taiwan, the brakes come from Germany and the chassis is Norwegian.
On a single full charge, the Tesla Roadster can roam for 220 miles. This is a little difficult to imagine, as it runs on exactly the same litium ion batteries that you find in your MacBook. Tesla's battery capacity equals the power of more than 1,000 such computer batteries. Just the battery costs more than $20,000, corresponding to one fifth of the car's selling price.
The Roadster holds a top speed of flabbergasting 125 mph. Initially it was supposed to go from 0 to 60 mph in merely 4 seconds. The car that is rolling out on Monday will take 5.7 seconds to do that move, however, in order to meet the strict durability standards. Despite missing its initial acceleration target, the Tesla Roadster still accelerates better than most cars on the road.
Ms. Yoler, the board member, is a managing director of the investment bank GrowthPoint Technology Partners. It helps entrepreneurs raise capital for their ventures and later take them public or strike merger deals. Her involvement in Tesla Motors dates back to her former colleagueship with Tesla's founder Martin Eberhard. The two assoicates went for a joyful lunch ride in the first Tesla prototype that was made in 2002."I believed strongly in the entrepreneurs", says Ms. Yoler. "When they asked me to take a test drive it was amazing. The sheer innovation behind it was unbelievable."
As part of Tesla's high-end marketing strategy for the car, celebrities like Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Google founder Larry Page are among the first buyers. The price starts at about $100,000, which makes Tesla more than double the price-tag of Norwegian electric car brand Think. However, Tesla prefers to be compared to traditional sports cars like Porsche, Lotus and Lamborghini rather than the other electric carts for sale so far.
To distinguish themselves further, the Tesla team will not have a traditional dealer network. Instead, the car will be sold on the Internet, with showrooms in Menlo Park and Los Angeles.
"High end sports cars do not normally test drive", explains Ms. Yoler, making it very clear in which lane she wants to steer Tesla.
No doubt there is still a long road to success for this venture. Ms. Yoler is one of 20 private investors who together with another 10 institutional investors have put in a total of $150 million.
Vint Cerf's Internet Wishlist
What is the Internet missing?
"Better safety," says Vint Cerf, Google's vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist.
Cerf is 'the father of the Internet', so his opinion matters. Here is his wishlist:
- Semantic Web.
- Broadband internet access for everybody.
- Multilingual, simultaneous translation from text and conversation.
- Better use of radio communication in the net.
- And, one of the most fascinating ideas: extra-terrestrial web.
Is it all possible?
"It is," Mr. Cerf says.
Mr. Cerf's past accomplishments give him the credibility to forecast the future. He helped build the foundation for today's Internet in the early 1970's while working as a an assistant professor at Stanford University. With colleagues, he wrote a blueprint for TCP/IP-protocol. The protocol transformed the defense department network project named Arpanet into the Internet we all know today.
Mr. Cerf travels around the world giving talks about the internet and it's future prospects. He is "trying to make things happen," he says, adding, "I'm not interested in theory only."
Friday, March 7, 2008
Apple Wants iPhone Inside the Corporations
Up until now, the iPhone has been looked upon as a mobile device with a mostly recreational function, with many features heavy on entertainment. Free phones have been distributed by the hundreds to companies such as Genentech and institutions such as the Stanford University.
Despite the positive response from users, IT departments have been sceptical because of the iPhone’s lack of certain functions, such as corporate email, and potential security issues.
For serious corporate work, the BlackBerry has been the most popular tool. On Thursday, Apple took a step towards changing that by announcing the support for Microsoft’s widely used Exchange message system. Apple also said that IT departments will also be able to access iPhones from a central location, wiping out vital information in case the devices are stolen or lost.
Apple’s iPhone announcement was much anticipated and is viewed by many as an attempt by Steve Jobs to silence critics. With the announcement, Mr. Jobs seems to recognize that the technical and commercial environment surrounding the iPhone is changing quickly. Thursday afternoon, after Jobs had presented the SDK (software developer’s kit) aimed at letting independent developers get more of a say of how the iPhone should be direction, Apple opened a web site where anyone can download free beta versions of the kit. Interest was so huge that the site stalled almost immediately.
There was a lot of excitement in the air even before the analysts, bloggers and reporters – all permitted entry by invitation only – would entered the Town Hall theatre on the Apple campus. In the great universe of echoes, the world where Mac-fans live, Fortune magazine was referring to rumors posted by MacRumors, who quoted a posting by MacScoop. Minute for minute, every word of Steve Jobs was transmitted to the world inside what Fortune-journalist Philip Elmer-DeWitt call “the reality distortion field”, a place where people standing close to Jobs start to believe everything he says.
Perhaps of greatest interest to the community of die-hard Apple fans, the company is offering a chance for developers to sell new applications through Apple and get 70 percent of the revenues. This is a great leap forward for the software community, which until now has had great problems designing programs for a vast variety of mobile phones.
To get the development going faster, Apple said it will cooperate with the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, who will set up a new fund worth 100 million dollars for start-ups that write applications for iPhone.
Some of the big issues regarding the iPhone remain alive. For instance, the iPhone is still locked to a single carrier, AT&T, meaning that owners cannot switch to another carrier without ditching or disabling the phone. There still is no file transfer via Bluetooth, no way to use Skype, no use of 3G standard and no video camera.
That leaves lots of work for Apple’s engineers and its chief salesman, Steve Jobs.
Thursday, March 6, 2008
New Strategy for HP Labs: Placing Fewer, Bigger Bets
In a major shift in priorities, Hewlett Packard’s corporate laboratories will concentrate its effort into 20 to 30 big projects, instead of the roughly 150 smaller projects that it currently supports. The new strategy aims to get more products out of the research labs, and into customer’s hands, in less time.
Prith Banerjee, has been head of HP Labs, Hewlett Packard’s corporate research facility, since August 2008. On Thursday he announced a new direction for the Labs. HP Labs will reorganize into 23 new, independent labs, in seven locations around the world. At the same time, research will be concentrated far fewer projects than today.’
“We are going to refocuse our efforts into 20 to 30 big bets, instead of the 150 smaller ones we used to work on”, said Prith Banerjee.
The reason for the change of direction is simple: HP wants to be able to commercialize more of the work done at the Labs. And the company also wants to speed up the transfer of new technology from the Labs.
“It is the one who comes fastest with a new product to the market who wins,” said Mr. Banerjee.
As a way to speed up the tech-transfer process, the Lab is setting up a Technology Transfer Offfice. It will be responsible both for bringing product development from the Labs into HP’s business units, and for licensing agreements with other companies.
In the future, technology transfer at HP is also going to mean people transfer. The researchers behind a new technology will be put in a group with the business units engineers, working together to get it turned into new products fast. According to the company’s management, the reorganization is not a cost-cutting measure.
“This is one of the few places in the world where the R in R&D is still left. We got a great team in the Labs, a great leader in Prith,” said Mark Hurd, Hewlett Packard’s CEO.
The new direction doesn’t mean the end of all blue sky research at the labs. Quite the opposite. Said Mr. Banerjee, “We are allocating one third to basic exploratory work, which is more than we did before.”
Other measures taken by HP include a new practice of inviting venture capitalists to become entrepreneurs-in-residence at the Labs. This will give the venture firms and their portfolio companies easier access to the Labs’ work. The first to participate is Foundation Capital, a VC firm based in Menlo Park.
In a world where many large companies are ending centralized research altoghether, HP is trying to find a way to keep alive the traditon, but give it new relevance. There is one potential downside, though. When you bet on fewer, bigger projects you might ditch the wrong project. Banerjee’s “solution” is to form an internal review board, with people both from the research and business sides of the company, to evaluate all yes-or-no decisions on projects.
Vint Cerf Says
"It's good for innovation to let everyone be a part of it. The point is that you want everyone's contribution to count."
"New innovations do not happen unless someone is discontent. I found that out in high school... but I wasn't an unhappy high school student."
"Internet was meant to carry pieces of data from one place to another. End of story."
"There is no reason for news media to die, except for one thing: the business models are to tied up to the delivery models. That has to change"
"If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. If we're not failing from time to time, we're not pushing the envelope enough.""Always look for innovations where there is an unsustainable system. By 2050, the oil tankers of today will be the water tankers of tomorrow."
"I am a 19th century man living in the 21st century"
Vint Cerf on Wikipedia
How To Succeed With Innovation
Have courage and a willingness to take risks, but don't over-analyze: that is what the former driving force Applied Materials chief, Dan Maydan, sees as the foundation for a successful innovator. According to Maydan, one should not go too deep into technology, otherwise you will end up dismissing every idea with the argument that it has been done before.
This may seem surprising, considering that remarkable inventions have been a part of his daily life even before he moved to Silicon Valley from Israel in 1967. Dr. Maydan also has a place in Silicon Valley's Engineering Hall of Fame. But he is no purist. He believes that innovation has a commercial component, and in that sense many of the great scientists, not even Einstein, can not be labeled as innovation. To succeed, an innovation must be commercially successful.
Dr. Dan Maydan studied engineering at the Israel Institute of Technology and holds a Ph.D. in Physics from Edinburgh University of Scotland.
Dr. Maydan's most important work was done at the Bell Labs and later at Applied Materials, where he had a pivotal role in developing specialized equipment for the semiconductor industry. These include manufacturing systems for the world's most advanced integrated circuits. At the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. one can admire the Precision 5000, Applied Materials' groundbreaking tool developed under the leadership of Dr. Maydan. Today the tool is considered to be one of the technologies that is a part of chip history and thereby has helped shape society in many ways.
Dr. Maydan was a member of the board of Applied Materials between 1992 and 2003, and the president from 1994 and onwards. He says he is an admirer of, among other companies, Apple, Google and Johnson & Johnson.
When looking at the chip industry, he says that the days of great invention are past us and are mainly about reducing power consumption.
“Semiconductors are no longer a world of technology, but a world of manufacturing," says Dr. Maydan. "The development is very slow, the semiconductor is mature now.”
Instead, he seems more excited about the biotech industry, and how the human brain will be put into more work, tuned into a different logic.
Venture Communists and Interplanetary Internet
But aren't Chinese people too subdued? "That might have been true 40 years ago, and even 20 years ago," Cerf says. " But definitely not 2008." The key is discontent. That is what Vint Cerf calls the major force of innovation - and Chinese people have got it. "They are no longer happy to stay where they are." Cerf says. "They want to improve their standard of living, and they are willing to work for it." " China is showing serous signs of innovating on their own," he adds. " And with the large-scale industry they are now in power to dictate what the standards should be." His words weigh a lot. The guy is after all known as one of the fathers of the internet. Presently the vice president and "Chief Internet Evangelist" of Google he is still in the midst of innovation. So what is he up to now? "Interplanetary internet" he says. It's true. Google it.
" Venture communists" - that's what Vint Cerf calls the Chinese entrepreneurs. Unlike Dan Maydan, who took the flor of the Innovationbeat newsroom yesterday, Cerf is certain that China is going to be able to replicate the success of Silicon Valley.
